Poverty

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> The Muck We Must Climb Out Of

Kansas illegally underfunds poorer school districts, court rules. Wading into a battle being fought in state capitols across the nation, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled Friday that disparities in the public funding of school districts violate the state constitution.

The court ordered Kansas to cure these disparities by July 1 and asked a lower court to evaluate how much the state should be investing in public schools. It was not quite the slam-dunk ruling that school funding advocates had hoped for; the court did not set funding levels, as a lower court had. But education advocates, who have been battling the Kansas Legislature on school funding levels for more than a decade, cheered the ruling nonetheless.
Everyday Sociology Talk: Annette Lareau on Social Class and Parenting.

Famine

Welfare Scams Are The Only Option For A Lot Of People Spike Mafford/Photodisc/Getty Images In its heyday, Eastern Kentucky was ride or die for the coal industry. Unfortunately, expensive, non-renewable energy that slowly transforms the planet into a circle of Hell has fallen out of favor for some reason. As a result, production has dropped dramatically. "The New York Times found that some parents here take their kids out of literacy classes to keep $700 disability benefits coming in," Anonymous says.
Greece Finance. Poor Americans Pay Double The State, Local Tax Rates Of Top One Percent. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney may be almost right in claiming that 47 percent of Americans "pay no income tax," but the poorest Americans pay a far higher state and local tax rate than those in the top 1 percent.

In fact, 46 percent of U.S. households paid no federal income tax last year, and it is misleading to focus on just the federal income tax, one of the few progressive parts of the U.S. tax system. Rather, a look at often regressive state and local tax rates throws cold water on the idea that the poor don't pay their fair share. Nearly every U.S. state taxes the poor more than the rich, according to a 2009 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Overall, the poorest 20 percent of households paid an average 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2007, while the top 1 percent on average paid just 5.2 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, according to the study.

Wisconsin Takes Lead In F*ck The Poors Sweepstakes: Now You Can’t Buy Beans And Rice. Wisconsin is one of those states that really hates poor people.

(Yeah, we know. Just like the other 49.) The state’s Republicans are particularly obsessed with what poors eat, or don’t eat, or where they buy food to eat, or whether they’re really poor enough to deserve to eat, or how best to humiliate them for wanting to eat. So in addition to separate but “equal” grocery stores, drug-testing welfare recipients, and spying on your neighbors’ grocery carts to make sure they’re not using YOUR tax dollars to buy unnecessary luxuries like food, Wisconsin Republicans have some more terrific ideas they’re kicking around in Assembly Bill 177 to crack down on so-called “low-income individuals” and their fraudulent eating habits: It’s not as if we haven’t heard conservatives complain, many times, about how people who receive government assistance shouldn’t be allowed to dine on lobster — and by government assistance, they don’t mean tax cuts for the rich.
Rightinvestment_design_2.23.15_final. Racism in the United States: By the Numbers.

Wealth: Having it all and wanting more. Eighty rich people now have as much wealth as 50% of the rest of humanity combined. This post was updated at 1:00pm ET Billionaires are getting richer, according to a new study from Oxfam.

Blaming the victim & Poverty. 7 Ways My Modern Country Turned Into a Dystopia Overnight. Total economic collapse: we all know it happens, but we're much more used to dealing with the concept via Robocop.

There are, however, real people out in the world who have watched the bottom fall out of their national economy. Greece started the 2000s with record wages and falling unemployment. Then the global economy drunkenly jumped off the high dive into an empty pool, and this happened to Greece's unemployment rate: QuartzPlus, unemployment among unemployed workers is nearly 100 percent.
Neuroepidemiology 2013, Vol. 40, No. 3 - Prevalence of Traumatic Brain Injury in the General Adult Population: A Meta-Analysis. Abstract Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant public-health concern.

To understand the extent of TBI, it is important to assess the prevalence of TBI in the general population. However, the prevalence of TBI in the general population can be difficult to measure because of differing definitions of TBI, differing TBI severity levels, and underreporting of sport-related TBI. Additionally, prevalence reports vary from study to study.
Electricmink comments on I believe its insensitive to expect the poor to "pick themselves up by the bootstraps" CMV.